concert review: Palo Alto Philharmonic

Fumbling around after my return from the UK for a concert to review for the Daily Journal, I skipped all the holiday concerts, which 1) I wasn't in the mood for; 2) would require prior study on my part; and picked a local amateur orchestra that was doing Shostakovich's Second Piano Concerto, an old favorite, and some other stuff I mostly already knew. Easy as pie. What was hard was 1) figuring out where the space lines were in the parking lot in the dark and pouring rain; 2) finding the rest room, somewhere halfway down the high school campus that the auditorium was on the edge of; 3) suppressing a rapidly developing cough which ruined most of the next week for me.